Thierry Klein of Nokia Bell Lab says he’s what some people might call a ‘space geek’ – and although he’s never traveled in orbit, a planned mission with NASA to launch an LTE network on the moon to settle him just a little closer.
4G LTE networks are well established here on earth, but what is needed to translate cellular technology for lunar surface applications?
FierceWireless spoke to Klein, head of the Research and Industrial Automation Research Lab at Nokia Bell Labs, to find out.
To begin with, it takes a lot of testing. If a mobile website is down or something is not working properly in a terrestrial network, the technician or engineering staff is in line to fix it. On the moon, however, help is not exactly a truck roll (or even a rocket rack) gone.
“You can never test enough,” Klein told Fierce.
Fortunately, the latest mission with NASA is not Nokia’s first foray into LTE. The Finnish vendor was the technology partner for an earlier privately funded project in 2018 with Vodafone and Audi to put LTE on the moon.
The mission never flew, but Nokia has already built an LTE system for the purpose. It sets up configurations exactly as they would be used on the moon to test performance, range, throughput and more. According to Klein, about 25 tests were performed in environmental rooms for extreme conditions and stress factors such as shock, vibration, operation in a vacuum, heat and radiation.
The new project is part of NASA’s Artemis program, and Nokia won a $ 14.1 million grant for its winning proposal “Tipping Point” which called for the space program to help develop technology for sustainable human operations on the lunar surface by 2030.
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Now, however, Nokia needs to integrate the equipment with a lunar lander developed by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, and it still needs to be developed and tested to suit the requirements for the specific mission available – which, although similar , is also unique.
“That’s really the focus for us this year,” Klein said of development, integration and testing.
The launch date is a time in 2022. A location for the mission has not yet been finalized, but it is aimed at the South Pole of the Moon for operation during a few weeks of moonlight.
Radiate me
What does a lunar LTE network look like? Nokia’s plans start with equipment that is optimized and hardened to withstand extreme conditions, from takeoff to landing, to intense radiation once on the surface.
According to Klein, all the commercial network elements have been scaled down into what essentially becomes an entire LTE network in a box.
“You have integrated your radio, your baseband, your core, all your functions into a single compact unit that will be deployed on the lunar lander,” Klein said along with antennas. He compared it to a small cell with an integrated developing packet core (ePC).
The equivalent user equipment (EU) is mounted on the Rover, also with its own antennas, to establish the link from the lunar lander to the EU on the Rover.
The antennas do not radiate from a typical tower height of 100 feet, but place them between 3 and 5 meters from the ground. Klein said it has a big impact on reach, and the project is focused on two scenarios.
One is short distance and sends the rover 300 to 400 meters from the lander, and a second target for longer distance where the rover will be up to 5 kilometers from the lander. This is something Nokia believes is achievable based on experimental validation with its equipment, power levels and altitude, Klein said.
Together with the LTE system, Nokia provides operational maintenance software that is reconnected with mission control to handle management, maintenance, configurations and the remote control of the network itself.
The Moon offers its own unique challenges on the site, but one of the most important things is that you will not find any skyscrapers like in the center of a large metropolitan area.
“The lunar landscape is very different, no obstructions, no buildings, no trees,” Klein said. “At the same time you have valleys and craters and rocks, but it’s generally open terrain so that helps with the range.” And electromagnetic waves propagate even without atmosphere.
Looking for a signal?
The mission’s goal is not for astronauts to send video chats or GIFs – at least not initially.
Space communications typically use proprietary technologies developed by defense or aerospace companies, Klein said with Wi-Fi used on the International Space Station. And this is different from direct communication from space to earth using satellites or other technologies.
No cellular technologies are used in space, Klein said. This would therefore be the first time that cellular has come into play for lunar surface or spatial communication.
As an unmanned space mission, the primary purpose is to establish communication on the moon on the surface – with data connections between the lunar lander and a custom equivalent of an end-user device mounted on the rover. For this project, it mainly involves HD video and data transfer from the Rover to the Lander, as well as remote control of the Rover.
Nokia hopes to deliver advanced features like throughput, latency, reliability and other features of 4G. In the future, access to information, machine interactions, voice and video will be part of the picture as astronauts enter Lunar, Mars or other space missions.
“In the future, it will be crew missions, so that astronauts can talk to each other, machines, sensors, devices and really all their video, speech applications, biometric applications, telemetry, sensor data collection that they can collect, as well as any other automation and robot control,” said Klein.
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While NASA is looking for a sustainable presence on the moon, a human element also comes into play and motivates Nokia.
“We use cellular technologies every day and astronauts use these capabilities in their personal lives as well,” Klein said, and Nokia feels that they should also have access to those while performing missions, not just here on earth.
Test, test
There are four key areas that Nokia needs to prepare for to ensure that hardware and software are robust enough.
The first is to make sure it survives the launch and landing, Klein explained with mechanical stresses such as shock, vibration and acceleration.
The second is to be able to work in extreme environments, with temperature variations, under air and radiation.
Radiation is, according to Klein, one of the most unique challenges in space.
The effect of radiation on software is that it can turn bits into code “and then all of a sudden your code no longer works.” The question becomes how to guard against and recover from it. And not all hardware components are equally susceptible to radiation, he explained.
Third is reliability, as mentioned earlier.
‘There’s just no way to send someone to change the equipment; it must therefore be absolutely reliable, you must be redundant, both on the hardware and software, and you must be able to remotely set, recharge and manage your equipment, ”Klein said.
And fourth is all about size, weight and power. According to Klein, this means integrating as much as possible into a single form factor and optimizing the power consumption so that dimensions and functions are reduced to only what is needed. But it is a balance between the third point of reliability and robustness, he noted, with double redundancy on the hardware elements.
Although radiation is unique to space, small footprints, energy consumption and weight are also important for an terrestrial network.
“Not only is it exciting to put it into space, but we see that we will take advantage of the technology and development opportunities that will also apply in rural environments,” Klein said. “By doing so, we will absolutely learn and optimize networks and then bring the lessons back to earth and apply them in our commercial product for industry applications.”
Suggest oil rigs or mines, where remote control also applies to small form factors.
The team is looking forward to a successful mission to validate the achievement, as well as to provide models so that it can be designed and dimensioned for future applications, possibly on a larger scale in space.
On the personal side for Klein and the team, he said that the most exciting aspect is for the technology that Nokia Bell Laboratories has built, pushing it beyond current limits.
“It’s just a very exciting opportunity to take something as far as possible, maybe literally,” Klein said.